A fresh look at lead paint

Friday

Sep 28, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 28, 2007 at 1:37 PM

Doctors are talking to parents more these days about painted toys, toy jewelry and other products, many of them in the headlines in the recent wave of high-profile, sweeping recalls. And they’re urging all to have their youngsters screened, even those sure their home is lead-free.

Lane Lambert

In his years of practice, Plymouth pediatrician Dr. Terence McAllister has treated just one case of lead poisoning. And he has never forgotten it.

She was a little girl in Dayton, Ohio, where the Massachusetts native did his residency training. She had no obvious symptoms, but a routine blood test showed that she had three times the maximum level of lead that’s considered safe. She was hospitalized immediately.

For McAllister - who’s also on the staff at Jordan Hospital - her case illustrates why lead poisoning from toys or other sources is such an elusive hazard, compared to more common childhood risks: Though the girl’s home was lead-free, she absorbed a high dose from playing around discarded lead objects in a nearby landfill.

With other local pediatricians and family-practice doctors, he’s talking to parents more these days about painted toys, toy jewelry and other products, many of them in the headlines in the recent wave of high-profile, sweeping recalls. And they’re urging all to have their youngsters screened, even those sure their home is lead-free.

This week, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced seven distinct recalls involving nearly 600,000 Chinese-made toys, all of them containing lead paint. There have been 50 such recalls so far this year, involving millions of toys sold at retailers big and small nationwide.

Yet experts stress that toys far from pose the only dangers, when it comes to exposing children to lead paint.

“You can avoid day to day hazards like slips and falls or bicycle accidents,” McAllister said. “But lead poisoning is insidious. It can come from inside the house or outside.”

“You can get it from all sorts of sources,” agreed Dr. Sean Palfrey, the director of Boston’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. “Houses in poor condition. Renovations that disturb old paint.”

Palfrey made his comments the day after he joined Clean Water Action and other consumer-advocacy groups in stating that more than a dozen vinyl toys bought in greater Boston tested high for lead content - among them a Spiderman backpack and pencil case and a McDonald’s play set.

“Under the radar”

Long known as a source of poisoning, lead can produce neurological damage and stunt the development of the brain and central nervous system, especially in children under 5.

Banned in the U.S. from painted toys and household paint since 1978, serious cases of lead exposure have become increasingly infrequent. But doctors say it takes very little to create a health risk, especially around an old house where the paint is peeling and crumbing to dust.

“Chewing one paint chip can knock a child’s lead level from zero to 30 or 40,” Palfrey said.

That exposure - 30 to 40 micrograms per deciliter, or 3.4 ounces of blood - was the level that put the Ohio girl in the hospital. Massachusetts and other states consider 10 micrograms the maximum safe level.

Not everyone is alarmed. At Quincy’s Manet Community Health Center, chief medical officer Dr. William Brandon said his staff haven’t seen a serious lead level among thousands of youngsters they’ve checked in his five years there.

“It’s very rare,” Brandon said.

He thinks the recent rash of recalls of tainted, Chinese-made toys is cause for some concern, but he said the greatest hazards continue to be playtime accidents, and parents not buckling their children into seatbelts.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, 2 percent of young children across the country showed elevated levels of lead in recent years, compared to 4 percent in the early 1990s. But older houses and outside sources continue to pose a problem for hundreds of thousands of kids across the country, many in Massachusetts.

According to the state Department of Public Health, almost 192,000 youngsters aged 9 months to 4 years were screened for lead exposure in 2005-06 - 73 percent of all kids that age. Of that total, only 459 showed significant levels of lead in their blood, including 26 in Brockton and 15 in South Shore communities.

Of those 459, 96 were “lead poisoned,” with levels of at least 25 micrograms per 3.4 ounces.

Those 96 included 7 in Brockton and 8 around the South Shore, with two each in Abington, Quincy, Rockland and Stoughton.

“Get reassured”

While 44 percent of Massachusetts houses still have some lead paint, according to the DPH, McAllister and others say youngsters are more likely to ingest the metal as dust on floors or in the air, rather than from paint chips they’ve chewed and swallowed.

In the wake of recent toy recalls, he and Brandon recommend all parents check the CDC’s list of suspect toys, for peace of mind if nothing else.

“If a child has a history of playing with any of those toys, it wouldn’t hurt to take them to the doctor,” Brandon said. “It’s an easy pin-prick test, so they can get reassured.”

Lane Lambert of The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.) may be reached at llambert@ledger.com.

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